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“It’s nothing, it’s nothing—it’s stupid.” She put her hand to his face and attempted a smile with lips that wobbled and a dimpled chin. Her voice was a fractured sob. “That was just, oh, I don’t, I can’t—” She reached for him and pulled him down to lock
against her lips, her salt tears in both their mouths.
He pulled away slightly, to see her eyes. “What happened?” All four points of his personal compass had converged on a place of pure, mind-bending pleasure. He’d thought she’d been there with him in those singular obliterating moments of perfection. Disappointment might split him in two.
She dragged him back down, tried to hide in their closeness. Tried to stop him seeing her, understanding her. She fought him off with the softest, deepest kisses and stunned with distress, he almost let her win. Against her trembling mouth he said, “I need to know.”
And she whispered, so light, so delicate, “You made me fly away,” then she tugged his hair tight, “and I didn’t shatter.”
The tension fell away from him, like another eruption, this one near finished him off. “Ah shit, you scared me. I’ve never made anyone cry doing this, except you.”
“Oh Jake, I’m sorry.” Rielle curled her hand around his neck. “I couldn’t hold the tears, I tried. I didn’t want to spin you out like last time but it was too much feeling—good feeling. I didn’t know it could be like that. I didn’t know I could feel like that. I don’t have the words.”
He groaned and hugged her to him. Relief he hadn’t hurt her enveloped him like a thick blanket of exhaustion. He rolled to his back, settling her on his chest. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
She nuzzled against his jaw. “I am the sun and the moon and the stars.”
He smiled. “That good?”
She answered with a long sweet kiss that stung his brain to numbness. When he could talk again he said, “Way to freak a guy out, Rie.”
“I didn’t mean to.” She traced a fingertip across his lips, brought her lips to his ear. “You’re a sex god, Jake.”
He laughed. “Fit for a rock goddess.” But when his laughter died away he worried. Her reaction still freaked him. She lay with her head on his chest, her breathing synced with his, her body entirely relaxed, but her words capable of shocking him like 240 volts, killing him like 100 amps.
He traced the line of her scar, only just visible to his fingertips. He’d been rocked to see it. How had that injury not killed her? What part did it play in making her so fierce, so armoured from her true self? “You’re not—” He didn’t know what to ask. She wasn’t inexperienced in bed, he didn’t understand what just happened to her.
She trailed light fingers down his abdomen. “I trusted you.”
“Are you saying you didn’t trust other people you slept with?” He felt her nod. “Rie, why would you do that?”
She lifted her head, her eyes heavy with fatigue. “Because I didn’t trust myself either and I didn’t know it would make a difference.”
He hugged her close again, stroked her back, this wild woman, so strong but so brittle and insecure as well. He knew it would take some time to sleep now. Sorrow for her curled lonely claws around his heart. To be used and not to have been loved properly, he dared not show her that emotion; she didn’t do pity. But he could show her what the value of her trust was. Now that bridge was crossed, he could love her for all the others who hadn’t understood.
“Give us time, Rie. We can build a world from trust,” he said, but from her soft breath he knew she’d already crossed into sleep. He stared down at her, sprawled half across him, her face in profile: the wink of her nose stud as she rose on his inhalation, her tangled mess of hair, the curve of her lush lips and the fan of the outrageously long false lashes on her cheek.
He spoke on the fringe of aloud, knowing he had no audience and whatever he said was safe and secret. “I’m in serious trouble here. Serious. See, I think I’m in love with this tough chick rock star and I know she feels something for me too.”
He took her hand and moved it so it rested over his heart, trapped it there under his hand, waited to see if she’d stir, half of him wanting her to, so she could tell him what to do. “But I think she might slip through my fingers and I don’t know how to stop her. I don’t know if she’ll let me stop her. Tell me, what the fuck am I supposed to do about that?”
35. New
Rielle woke at the approach of dawn to Jake’s soft snore and sat to watch him. This too was new. No man she ever took to bed was still there in the morning. One way or another she got rid of them, either with a direct request or by more subtle, but equally brutal means of shutting them out. Sometimes they came back, but they were never invited to stay. It was easier that way. In any case, they weren’t still there, warm and vulnerable to her appraisal when she woke.
So much about this man was unique. So much about what she wanted from him was foreign. This man she wanted to keep. Worse, she was almost scared to let him go. What was that about? Surely it was just the sex. Holy fuck. The most substance-shattering sex of her life. But what if it was more than that? She couldn’t think that through, not with him just a stretch away. Not knowing what they did together was a whole new kind of explosive seared inside her bone marrow, branded on her brain.
Jake lay on his back, one arm draped across the bed, the other looped over his waist, the sheet tucked down low on his hips. She wanted to trace the curve of his chest, down the muscle moguls of his abdominals to the sharp cut of his hip bone, first with her hand, then with her lips; but she didn’t want him awake, not yet. Not til she’d worked out what to do with him.
He was so much stronger than she’d thought—so much better at standing up to her, not taking her shit, than anyone else except Rand. That was a revelation, unexpected and confusing. And distracting. Would he wake if she smoothed his dark brow? If she rolled her thumb over his cheekbone?
If this was just about the sex, why did he make her feel she was transparent to him, as though he could see straight into her and wasn’t horrified by what he found? Why did she want to talk to him almost as much as she wanted to kiss his throat, tongue his nipple? The thought of spending the day with him was nearly as exciting as knowing they’d make love again that morning.
When she could be bothered, her usual hook-ups were about opportunity and physical need, forgetting and fear of being alone. All of them transitory, deliberately featureless, about flesh not feelings.
Jake was about physical need as well, so maybe he wasn’t different. Maybe the way he could tune her body better than anyone else just confused the issue. Maybe the desire to have breakfast with him and tumble into bed again was a different version of the same thing she’d always done. Distracted herself with pretty men.
Maybe she was going mad.
